His theory is therefore this, that God made the thunder but the lightning
made itself." Of course, poor Robert Montgomery was crushed flat, and
rightly. Yet before this essay was written his poems had a larger
circulation than Southey or Coleridge, just as in our own time Martin
Tupper had a larger sale than Tennyson or Browning. Fancy if Tupper had
been treated in the same vein how the following lines would have fared:--

"Weep, relentless eye of Nature,
Drop some pity on the soil,
Every plant and every creature
Droops and faints in dusty toil."

What do the plants toil at? I thought we knew they toil not, neither do
they spin. It goes on--

"Then the cattle and the flowers
Yet shall raise their drooping heads,
And, refreshed by plenteous showers,
Lie down joyful in their beds."

Whether the flowers are to lie down in the cattle beds or the cattle are
to lie down in the flower beds does not perhaps distinctly appear, but I
venture to think that either catastrophe is not so much to be desired as
the poet seems to imagine.

In the Diary of Jeames yellowplush a couplet of Lord Lytton's _Sea
Captain_ is thus dealt with--

"Girl, beware,